Kitabı oku: «Briefing for a Descent Into Hell»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Afterword

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Category:

Inner-space fiction

For there is never anywhere to go but in.

CENTRAL INTAKE HOSPITAL

General Remarks

… At midnight the police found Patient wandering on the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge. They took him into the station thinking he was drunk or drugged. They describe him as Rambling, Confused and Amenable. Brought him to us at 3 a.m. by ambulance. During admittance Patient attempted several times to lie down on the desk. He seemed to think it was a boat or a raft. Police are checking ports, ships, etc. Patient was well-dressed but had not changed his clothes for some time. He did not seem very hungry or thirsty. He was wearing trousers and a sweater, but he had no papers or wallet or money or marks of identity. Police think he was robbed. He is an educated man. He was given two Libriums but did not sleep. He was talking loudly. Patient was moved into the small Observation ward as he was disturbing the other Patients.

NIGHT NURSE 6 a.m.

Patient has been awake all day, rambling, hallucinated, animated. Two Librium three-hourly. Police no information. Clothes sent for tracing, but unlikely to yield results: chainstore sweater and shirt and underclothes. Trousers Italian. Patient still under the impression he is on some sort of voyage. Police say possibly an amateur or a yachtsman.

DOCTOR Y. 6 p.m.

I need a wind. A good strong wind. The air is stagnant. The current must be pounding along at a fair rate. Yes, but I can’t feel it. Where’s my compass? That went days ago, don’t you remember? I need a wind, a good strong wind. I’ll whistle for one. I would whistle for one if I had paid the piper. A wind from the East, hard on to my back, yes. Perhaps I am still too near the shore? After so many days at sea, too near the shore? But who knows, I might have drifted back again inshore. Oh no, no, I’ll try rowing. The oars are gone, don’t you remember, they went days ago. No, you must be nearer landfall than you think. The Cape Verde Islands were to starboard—when? Last week. Last when? That was no weak, that was my wife. The sea is saltier here than close inshore. A salt, salt sea, the brine coming flecked off the horses’ jaws to mine. On my face, thick crusts of salt. I can taste it. Tears, seawater. I can taste salt from the sea. From the desert. The deserted sea. Sea horses. Dunes. The wind flicks sand from the crest of dunes, spins off the curl of waves. Sand moves and sways and masses itself into waves, but slower. Slow. The eye that would measure the pace of sand horses, as I watch the rolling gallop of sea horses would be an eye indeed. Aye Aye. I. I could catch a horse, perhaps and ride it, but for me a sea horse, no horse of sand, since my time is man-time and it is God for deserts. Some ride dolphins. Plenty have testified. I may leave my sinking raft and cling to the neck of a sea horse, all the way to Jamaica and poor Charlie’s Nancy, or, if the current swings me south at last, to the coast where the white bird is waiting.

Round and round and round I go, the Diamond Coast, the Canary Isles, a dip across the Tropic of Cancer and up and across with a shout at the West Indies to port, where Nancy waits for her poor Charlie, and around, giving the Sargasso Sea a miss to starboard, with Florida florissant to port, and around and around, in the swing of the Gulf Stream, and around, with the Azores just outside the turn of my elbow, and down, past the coasts of Portugal where my Conchita waits for me, passing Madeira, passing the Canaries, always en passant, to the Diamond Coast again, and so around, and so around again and again, for ever and ever unless the current swings me South. But that current could never take me South, not. A current is set in itself, inexorable as a bus route. The clockwise current of the Northern seas must carry me, carry me, unless … yes. They may divert me a little, yes they will, steering me with a small feather from their white wings, steadying me south, holding me safe across the cross not to say furious currents about the Equator but then, held safe and sound, I’d find the South Equatorial at last, at last, and safe from all the Sargassoes, the Scyllas and the Charybs, I’d swoop beautifully and lightly, drifting with the sweet currents of the South down the edge of the Brazilian Highlands to the Waters of Peace. But I need a wind. The salt is seaming on the timbers and the old raft is wallowing in the swells and I am sick. I am sick enough to die. So heave ho my hearties, heave—no, they are all gone, dead and gone, they tied me to a mast and a great wave swept them from me, and I am alone, caught and tied to the North Equatorial Current with no landfall that I could ever long for anywhere in the searoads of all that rocking sea.

Nothing from police. No reports of any small boats, yachts or swimmers unaccounted for. Patient continues talking aloud, singing, swinging back and forth in bed. He is excessively fatigued. Tomorrow: Sodium Amytal. I suggest a week’s narcosis.

August 17th

DOCTOR Y.

I disagree. Suggest shock therapy.

August 18th

DOCTOR X.

Very hot. The current is swinging and rocking. Very fast. It is so hot that the water is melting. The water is thinner than usual, therefore a thin fast rocking. Like heat-waves. The shimmer is strong. Light. Different textures of light. There is the light we know. That is, the ordinary light let’s say of a day with cloud. Then, sunlight, which is a yellow dance added to the first. Then the sparkling waves of heat, heat-waves, making light when light makes them. Then, the inner light, the shimmer, like a suspended snow in the air. Shimmer even at night when no moon or sun and no light. The shimmer of the solar wind. Yes, that’s it. Oh solar wind, blow blow blow my love to me. It is very hot. The salt has caked my face. If I rub, I’ll scrub my face with pure sea salt. I’m becalmed, on a light, lit, rocking, deliriously delightful sea, for the water has gone thin and slippery in the heat, light water instead of heavy water. I need a wind. Oh solar wind, wind of the sun. Sun. At the end of Ghosts he said the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, and at the end of When We Dead Awaken, the Sun, into the arms of the Sun via the solar wind, around, around, around, around …

Patient very disturbed. Asked his name: Jason. He is on a raft in the Atlantic. Three caps Sodium Amytal tonight. Will see him tomorrow.

DOCTOR Y.

DOCTOR Y. Did you sleep well?

PATIENT. I keep dropping off, but I mustn’t, I must not.

DOCTOR Y. But why not? I want you to.

PATIENT. I’d slide off into the deep sea swells.

DOCTOR Y. No, you won’t. That’s a very comfortable bed, and you’re in a nice quiet room.

PATIENT. Bed of the sea. Deep sea bed.

DOCTOR Y. You aren’t on a raft. You aren’t on the sea. You aren’t a sailor.

PATIENT. I’m not a sailor?

DOCTOR Y. You are in Central Intake Hospital, in bed, being looked after. You must rest. We want you to sleep.

PATIENT. If I sleep I’ll die.

DOCTOR Y. What’s your name? Will you tell me?

PATIENT. Jonah.

DOCTOR Y. Yesterday it was Jason. You can’t be either, you know.

PATIENT. We are all sailors.

DOCTOR Y. I am not. I’m a doctor in this hospital.

PATIENT. If I’m not a sailor, then you aren’t a doctor.

DOCTOR Y. Very well. But you are making yourself very tired, rocking about like that. Lie down. Take a rest. Try not to talk so much.

PATIENT. I’m not talking to you, am I? Around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and …

NURSE. You must be feeling giddy. You’ve been going around and around and around for hours now, did you know that?

PATIENT. Hours?

NURSE. I’ve been on duty since eight, and every time I drop in to see you, you are going round and round.

PATIENT. The duty watch.

NURSE. Around and around what? Where? There now, turn over.

PATIENT. It’s very hot. I’m not far away from the Equator.

NURSE. You’re still on the raft, then?

PATIENT. You aren’t!

NURSE. I can’t say that I am.

PATIENT. Then how can you be talking to me?

NURSE. Do try and lie easy. We don’t want you to get so terribly tired. We’re worried about you, do you know that?

PATIENT. Well, it is in your hands, isn’t it?

NURSE. My hands? How is that?

PATIENT. You. You said We. I know that ‘We’. It is the categorical collective. It would be so easy for you to do it.

NURSE. But what do you want me to do?

PATIENT. You as we. Not you as you. Lift me, lift me, lift me. It must be easy enough for you. Obviously. Just use your—force, or whatever it is. Blast me there.

NURSE. Where to?

PATIENT. You know very well. Tip me South with your white wing.

NURSE. My white wing! I like the sound of that.

PATIENT. You can’t be one of them. If you were, you’d know. You are tricking me.

NURSE. I’m sorry that you think that.

PATIENT. Or perhaps you’re testing me. Yes, that’s a possibility.

NURSE. Perhaps that is it.

PATIENT. It’s just a question of getting out of the North Equatorial Current into the South Equatorial Current, from clockwise to anti-clockwise. The wise anti-clocks.

NURSE. I see.

PATIENT. Well, why don’t you?

NURSE. I don’t know how.

PATIENT. Is it a question of some sort of a password? Who was that man who was here yesterday?

NURSE. Do you mean Doctor Y.? He was in to see you.

PATIENT. He’s behind this. He knows. A very kindly contumacious man.

NURSE. He’s kind. But I wouldn’t say contumacious.

PATIENT. I say it, so why shouldn’t you?

NURSE. And Doctor X. was in the day before that.

PATIENT. I don’t remember any Doctor X.

NURSE. Doctor X. will be in later this afternoon.

PATIENT. In what?

NURSE. Do try and lie still. Try and sleep.

PATIENT. If I do, I’m dead and done for. Surely you must know that, or you aren’t a maid mariner.

NURSE. I’m Alice Kincaid. I told you that before. Do you remember? The night you came in?

PATIENT. Whatever your name, if you sleep you die.

NURSE. Well, never mind, hush. There, poor thing, you are in a state. Just lie and—there, there. Shhhhh, hush. No, lie still. Shhh … there, that’s it, that’s it, sleep. Sleeeeeeeep. Sle-e-p.

Patient distressed, fatigued, anxious, deluded,

hallucinated.

Try Tofronil? Marplan? Tryptazol? Either that

or shock.

August 21st

DOCTOR X.

DOCTOR Y. Well, now, nurse tells me you are Sinbad today?

PATIENT. Sin bad. Sin bad. Bad sin.

DOCTOR Y. Tell me about it? What’s it all about?

PATIENT. I’m not telling you.

DOCTOR Y. Why not?

PATIENT. You aren’t one of Them.

DOCTOR Y. Who?

PATIENT. The Big Ones.

DOCTOR Y. No, I’m just an ordinary sort of size, I’m afraid.

PATIENT. Why are you afraid?

DOCTOR Y. Who are they, The Big Ones?

PATIENT. There were giants in those days.

DOCTOR Y. Would you tell them?

PATIENT. I wouldn’t need to tell Them.

DOCTOR Y. They know already?

PATIENT. Of course.

DOCTOR Y. I see. Well, would you tell Doctor X.?

PATIENT. Who is Doctor X.?

DOCTOR Y. He was in yesterday.

PATIENT. In and Out. In and Out. In and Out.

DOCTOR Y. We think it would help if you talked to someone. If I’m no use to you, there’s Doctor X., if you like him better.

PATIENT. Like? Like what? I don’t know him. I don’t see him.

DOCTOR Y. Do you see me?

PATIENT. Of course. Because you are there.

DOCTOR Y. And Doctor X. isn’t here?

PATIENT. I keep telling you, I don’t know who you mean.

DOCTOR Y. Very well, then. How about Nurse? Would you like to talk to her? We think you should try and talk. You see, we must find out more about you. You could help if you talked. But try to talk more clearly and slowly, so that we can hear you properly.

PATIENT. Are you the secret police?

DOCTOR Y. No. I’m a doctor. This is the Central Intake Hospital. You have been here nearly a week. You can’t tell us your name or where you live. We want to help you to remember.

PATIENT. There’s no need. I don’t need you. I need Them. When I meet Them they’ll know my needs and there’ll be no need to tell Them. You are not my need. I don’t know who you are. A delusion, I expect. After so long on this raft and without real food and no sleep at all, I’m bound to be deluded. Voices. Visions.

DOCTOR Y. You feel that—there. That’s my hand. Is that a delusion? It’s a good solid hand.

PATIENT. Things aren’t what they seem. Hands have come up from the dark before and slid away again. Why not yours?

DOCTOR Y. Now listen carefully. Nurse is going to sit here with you. She is going to stay with you. She is going to listen while you talk. And I want you to talk, tell her who you are and where you are and about the raft and the sea and about the giants. But you must talk more loudly and clearly. Because when you mutter like that, we can’t hear you. And it is very important that we hear what you are saying.

PATIENT. Important to you.

DOCTOR Y. Will you try?

PATIENT. If I remember.

DOCTOR Y. Good. Now here is Nurse Kincaid.

PATIENT. Yes. I know. I know her well. She fills me full of dark. She darks me. She takes away my mind.

DOCTOR Y. Nonsense. I’m sure she doesn’t. But if you don’t want Nurse Kincaid either, we’ll simply leave a tape recorder here. You know what a tape recorder is, don’t you?

PATIENT. I did try and use one once but I found it inhibiting.

DOCTOR Y. You did? What for?

PATIENT. Oh, some damned silly lecture or other.

DOCTOR Y. You give lectures, do you? What sort of lectures? What do you lecture about?

PATIENT. Sinbad the sailor man. The blind leading the blind. Around and around and around and around and around and …

DOCTOR Y. Stop it! Please. Don’t start that again. Please.

PATIENT. Around and around and around and around and …

DOCTOR Y. Around what? You are going around what? Where?

PATIENT. I’m not going. I’m being taken. The current. The North Equatorial, from the North African Coast, across, past the West Indies to the Florida Current, past Florida around the Sargasso Sea and into the Gulf Stream and around with the West Wind Drift to the Canaries and around past the Cape Verde Islands around and around and around and around …

DOCTOR Y. Very well, then. But how are you going to get out?

PATIENT. They. They will.

DOCTOR Y. Go on, now. Tell us about it. What happens when you meet them? Try and tell us.

He gives lectures. Schools, universities, radio, television, politics? Societies to do with? Exploration, archaeology, zoology? Sinbad. ‘Bad sin.’ Suggest as a wild hypothesis that just this once patient may have committed a crime and this not just routine guilt?

DOCTOR Y.

Accept hypothesis. What crime?

DOCTOR X.

Setting off from the Diamond Coast, first there is the southerly coastal current to get out of. Not once or twice or a dozen times, on leaving the Diamond Coast, the shore-hugging current has dragged us too far South and even within sight of that African curve which rounded would lead us in helpless to the Guinea Current to who knows what unwanted landfalls. But we have always managed just in time to turn the ship out and pointing West with Trinidad our next stop. That is, unless this time we encountered Them. Around and Around. It is not a cycle without ports we long to reach. Nancy waits for poor Charlie in Puerto Rico, George has his old friend John on Cape Canaveral, and I when the ship has swung far enough inshore wait to see Conchita sitting on her high black rock and to hear her sing her song for me. But when greetings and farewells have been made so many times, they as well as we want the end of it all. And when the songs have been heard so often, the singers no longer are Nancy, alone, poor Charlie, alone, or any of us. The last few journeys past the garden where Nancy waits, she was joined by all the girls in her town, and they stood along the wall over the sea watching us sail past, and they sang together what had so often called poor Charlie and his crew in to them before.

Under my hand

flesh of flowers

Under my hand

warm landscape

You have given me back my world,

In you the earth breathes under my hand.

My arms were full of charred branches,

My arms were full of painful sand.

Now I sway in rank forests,

I dissolve in strong forests,

I am the bone the flowers in flesh.

Oh now we reach it –

now, now!

The whistling hub of the world.

It’s as if God had spun a whirlpool,

Flung up a new continent.

But we men stood in a line all along the deck and we sang to them:

If birds still cried on the shore,

If there were horses galloping all night,

Love, I could turn to you and say

Make up the bed,

Put fire to the lamp.

All night long we would lie and hear

The waves beat in, beat in,

If there were still birds on the dunes,

If horses still ran wild along the shore.

And then we would wave each other out of sight, our tears lessening with each circuit, for we were set for our first sight of Them, and they, the women, were waiting with us, for on us their release depended, since they were prisoners on that island.

On this voyage there were twelve men on board, with myself as Captain. Last time I played deckhand, and George was Captain. We were four days out from shore, the current swinging us along fair and easy, the wind coming from the North on to our right cheeks, when Charles, who was lookout, called us forward and there it was. Or, there they were. Now if you ask how it is we knew, then you are without feeling for the sympathies of our imaginations in waiting for just this moment. And that must mean that you yourselves have not yet learned that in waiting for Them lies all your hope. No, it is not true that we had imagined it in just such a form. We had not said or thought, ever: They will be shaped like birds or be forms of light walking on the waves. But if you have ever known in your life a high expectation which is met at last, you will know that the expectation of a thing must meet with that thing—or at least, that is the form in which it must be seen by you. If you have shaped in your mind an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes, then if there is such a creature in that sea you will not see anything less, or more—that is what you are set to see. Armies of angels could appear out of the waves, but if you are waiting for a one-eyed giant, you could sail right through them and not feel more than a freshening of the air. So while we had not determined a shape in our thoughts, we had not been waiting for evil or fright. Our expectations had been for aid, for explanation, for a heightening of our selves and of our thoughts. We had been set like barometers for Fair. We had known we would strike something that rang on a higher, keener note than ourselves, and that is why we knew at once that this was what we had been sailing to meet, around and around and around and around, for so many cycles that it might even be said that the waiting to meet up with Them had become a circuit in our minds as well as in the ocean.

We knew them first by the feeling in the air, a crystalline hush, and this was accompanied by a feeling of strain in ourselves, for we were not strung at the same pitch as that for which we had been waiting.

It was a smart, choppy sea and the air was flying with spray. Hovering above these brisk waves, and a couple of hundred yards away, was a shining disc. It seemed as if it should have been transparent, since the eye took in first the shine, like that of glass, or crystal, but being led inwards, as with a glass full of water, to what was behind the glitter. But the shine was not a reflected one: the substance of the disc’s walls was itself a kind of light. The day was racingly cloudy, the sky half cloud, half sun, and all the scene around us was this compound of tossing waves and foam, and flying spray, of moving light, everything changing as we watched. We were waiting for strangers to emerge from the disc and perhaps let down, using the ways of humanity, a dinghy or a boat of some kind so that we, standing along the deck’s edge, grasping fast to ropes and spars, might watch Them approach and take their measure—and adjust our thoughts and manners for the time. But no one appeared. The disc came closer, though so unnoticeably, being part of the general restless movement of the blue and the white, that it was resting on the air just above the waves a few paces off before we understood by a sinking of our hearts that we were not to expect anything so comfortable as the opening of a door, the letting down of a ladder, a boat, and arms bending as oars swung. But we were still not expecting anything in particular when it was already on us. What? What we felt was a sensation first, all through our bodies. In a fever or a great strain of exhaustion, or in love, all the resources of the body stretch out and expand and vibrate higher than in ordinary life. Well, we were vibrating at a higher pitch, and this was accompanied by a high shrill note in the air, of the kind that can break glasses—or probably break much more, if sustained. The disc that had been in our eyes’ vision a few yards away, an object among others, though an object stronger than the others, more obliterating—seemed to come in and invade our eyes. I am describing the sensation, for I cannot say what was the fact. It was certain that this disc rose a little way up from the waves, so that it was level with our deck, and then passed over us, or through us. Yet when it was on us, it seemed no longer a disc, with a shape, but it was more a fast beating of the air, a vibration that was also a sound. It was intolerable while it lasted, as if two different substances were in conflict, with no doubt of the outcome—but it did not last more than a moment, and when my eyes had lost the feeling of being filled with a swift-beating light, or sound, and my whole body from having been stretched or expanded or invaded, as if light (or sound) had the capacity of passing through one’s tissues, but in a shape as definite as one’s own, then I looked to see if George, who stood nearest to me, was still alive. But he was gone, and when I turned in terror to see where he was, and where the others were, they weren’t there. No one. Nothing. The disc, which had again become a crystal disc, hovering over the waves on the other side of the ship, was lifting into the sky. It had swept away or eaten up or absorbed my comrades and left me there alone. All the ship was empty. The decks were empty. I was in terror. And worse. For all these centuries I had been sailing around and around and around and around for no other reason than that one day I would meet Them, and now at last we had indeed inhabited the same pace of air, but I had been left behind. I ran to the other rail of the ship and clung there and opened my mouth to shout. I might indeed have shouted a little, or made some feeble kind of sound, but to what or to whom was I shouting? A silvery shining disc that seemed, as it lifted up and away into the air that it ought to be transparent but was not? It had no eyes to see me, no mouth to acknowledge my shouting with a sound of its own. Nothing. And inside were eleven men, my friends, whom I knew better than I knew myself. Since we do know our friends better than we know ourselves. Then, as I stood there, gazing into the scene of blue and white and silver that tossed and sprayed and shook and danced and dazzled, sea and air all mixed together, I saw that I was looking at nothing. The disc had vanished, was no more than the shape of a cell on my retina. Nothing.

I was sickened with loss, with knowledge of an unforeseeable callousness on their part. To take them and to leave me? In all our voyagings we had never envisaged that we might simply be lifted up and taken away like a litter of puppies or kittens. We had wanted instructions, or aid, we needed to be told how to get off this endless cycling and into the Southern current. Now that this had not happened, and no instructions or information had been given, only a sort of kidnapping, then I wanted to scream against their coldness and cruelty, as one small kitten that has been hidden by a fold of a blanket in the bottom of a basket mews out in loneliness as it moves blindly about, feeling with its muzzle and its senses for its lost companions among the rapidly chilling folds of the blanket.

I stayed at the deck’s edge. For while the ship needed steering and the sails setting, and for all I knew we had already swung about, I could not handle this ship by myself. I already knew that I must leave her, unless I was to choose to live on board her alone, on the small chance that the Disc would hover down again and discharge my companions in the same way it had taken them off. But I did not think this was likely to happen. And I was afraid to stay.

It was as if that Disc, or Crystal, in its swift passage across or through the ship, across or through me, had changed the atmosphere of the ship, changed me. I was shaking and shivering in a cold dread. I could hardly stand, but leaned clinging to a rope. When the shaking had seemed to stop, and I stood clenching my teeth and waiting for the puppy-warmth of life to come back, then the shaking began again, like a fit of malaria, though this was a sort of weakness, not a fever. Now everything in the ship was inimical to me, as if the Disc’s breath had started a rot in its substance. To say that I had been terrified and was still terrified would be too much of an everyday statement. No, I had been struck with foreignness, I had taken a deep breath of an insupportable air. I was not at all myself, and my new loathing that was so much more than a fear of the ship was in itself an illness. Meanwhile the sails shook and flapped and bellied or hung idle above my head. Meanwhile the ship shuddered and swung to every new shift in the fitfully changing wind. Meanwhile she was a creature that had been assaulted and left to die.

I began making a raft, using timber from the carpenter’s store. I worked feverishly, wanting to get away. It never crossed my mind to stay on her, so strong was my fear. Yet I knew that to set off by myself on a raft was more dangerous than staying. On the ship was water, food, some shelter, until it foundered or crashed on a rock. Until then, it would be my safety. But I could not stay. It was as if my having been ignored, left behind, out of all my old comrades, was in itself a kind of curse. I had been branded with my ship.

I worked for many hours and, when daylight went, I lashed a storm lantern to a spar and worked on through the night. I made a raft about twelve by twelve of balsawood poles. To this I lashed a locker full of rations, and a barrel of water. I fitted a sail on a mast in the middle of the raft. I took three pairs of oars, and lashed two spare pairs securely to the timbers of the raft. In the centre of the raft I made a platform of planks about four feet across. And all this time I worked in a deadly terror, a cold sick fear, attacked intermittently by the fits of shaking so that I had to double up as if in cramp, and hold on to a support for fear I’d shake myself to pieces.